America's first black bank

Islamic religious practice is deeply entwined with sound, from the call to prayer to memorising the Quran; learning to recite the holy text is very much an oral tradition relying on listening and repetition. All this poses a unique challenge for deaf Muslims. In November 2025, a ...  Show more

Benjamin Netanyahu is Israel’s longest serving prime minister. He was born in Tel Aviv in 1949, the year after the State of Israel was founded. One of three brothers, Netanyahu spent much of his early years in the United States pursuing his education. But following his older brot ...  Show more

The Ku Klux Klan was arguably America’s first organized terrorist movement. It was a paramilitary unit that arose in the South during the early years of Reconstruction. At its peak in the early 1870s, the Klan boasted many tens of thousands of members, no small number of them lan ...  Show more

President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, freeing the slaves in much of the South. But the road to freedom—true freedom—would take generations longer for most black Americans.

In this new six-part series, we investigate their stru ...

During the 1870s, more than a dozen African American men, many of whom had been born into slavery, were elected to the U.S. Congress. These political pioneers symbolized the sky high hopes of millions of former slaves during the years right after the Civil War. It was a period th ...  Show more

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the impact of Grant's presidency on Americans in the years after the Civil War in which he, with Lincoln, had led the Union Army to victory. His predecessor, Andrew Johnson, was prepared to let the Southern States decide for themselves which rights ...  Show more